Swarm is an installation that identifies people in the museum according to their demographic and segments them into ‘clans’ in competing versions of the gallery space.

A public art work installed on the facade of the Henry Art Gallery until November 2015. As people approach they are tracked, profiled and recorded by surveillance cameras, while ultrasonic speakers beam stories at them derived from Facebook status posts.

Sanctum opens May 4 – sign up to the project’s Facebook app.

This installation merges surveillance video with a self-help style voice-over, a psychology experiment, and a religious sermon.

A ring of five cameras is configured to continuously monitor a 360-degree field of view. The resulting panorama is then displayed on five screens on a wall. Software filters the video captured by the cameras to show only one person on each screen. The footage of each person loops, only being replaced once a new person stands in front of one of the cameras.

Five People in a Room included in The Public Private at Parsons, New York City Feb 7 – April 17.

A new installation is currently being installed at the Phillips Museum of Art, Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Art historian Johanna Gosse will present a paper titled “Virtual Panopticons: The Ethics of Observation in the Digital Age” at the College Art Association conference in Los Angeles. The paper is part of the Radical Art Caucus panel, chaired by Alan Wallach.

Five cameras are located in the center of the gallery, panoptically configured to continuously monitor a 360-degree field of view. Computers process the video captured by the cameras and filter out any footage that contains movement. Five screens on the wall of the gallery construct a panoramic representation of the gallery via the camera feeds. Regardless of the number of people in the gallery, it always appears empty in the video footage. Although the panorama seems unified, each screen is temporally inconsistent and discontinuous with the others.

Henry Art Gallery commissions Sanctum by James Coupe and Juan Pampin, to be realized in 2012

July 1, 2011 Henry Art Gallery Announces Façade Window Project Finalists Thousands of students, faculty, staff, and visitors walk past the Henry’s entrance every day. To better engage these passersby and make the public face of the Henry more dynamic, the Henry Art Gallery initiated the Façade Window Project. In late 2010 the museum issued […]

Thursday, August 11, 2011, 7:00 – 8:00 PM

The Henry Art Gallery invites you to join artist James Coupe for a screening and discussion of the artist’s recent work with ‘surveillance cinema’ in (re)collector, Surveillance Suite, and the web-based work Today, too, I experienced something I hope to understand in a few days.

Camera units track men and women of specific ages as they walk through the museum. They record vignettes of each subject and use these to generate video sequences, which are stored in a database.

>> click image for pdf

A new version of Today, too, I experienced something I hope to understand in a few days has been commissioned for the Abandon Normal Devices festival in Manchester, UK. In advance of the festival, forty new portraits were recorded of people from Manchester, and these will be used in combination with Facebook status posts by […]

At Olympia Film Society, James Coupe will discuss his work and screen several of his recent short films, alongside extracts from cinematic ‘templates’ that he has used, such as Antonioni’s Blow-Up.